The Emperor of Everything

Chapter 20

Ruiz came to himself, covered with greasy sweat, feeling not a great deal better than he had before his rest. He wiped his hands over his face, rubbing at his eyes, waiting for the remaining traces of the dream to fade. He had forgotten the content of the dream already, but he knew it had involved Nisa in some context, and he felt a touch of wistful loss at the thought of her. Sometimes he wished he could remember his dreams, even if they proved unpleasant, as this one evidently had.

Albany had started to move toward Ruiz, but had evidently thought better of it, and now stood still, one hand extended in a gesture of comfort or restraint. “Damn, Ruiz,” he said. “You’re giving me the crawls. Are you all right?”

“Sure. I’m fine.” Ruiz climbed out of the pilot chair and saw that he’d slept almost the full two hours he’d allotted himself. He flexed his injured shoulder and decided that it was healing well, responding to the tissue stimulants the armor’s medical limpet had injected.

Albany shook his head. “What a freak show,” he said, shaking his head. His face was pale inside the opening of his helmet, and he wasn’t smiling.

“Sorry,” Ruiz said. “Why don’t you take a nap next? I’ve got a wafer to scan, and some scheming to do.” He started to climb into his armor again, wrinkling his nose at the sour stinks that rose from the monomol segments.

For a moment Albany didn’t react, then he seemed to relax from some tautness that Ruiz hadn’t noticed until he had moved. “Yeah, yeah. I guess I’ll do that.” He began to strip off his own armor, and Ruiz saw that Albany’s hands were trembling.

“What’s been happening?” Ruiz asked.

Albany shrugged, and settled into the pilot’s chair. “Not much. We’re in a west-running current, drifting at a half knot. There was something going on right after you went to sleep, some fuss on the surface, with a lot of active sonar and detector drogues being dropped — someone looking for something. Probably wasn’t us, hey?”

“Maybe not,” said Ruiz. “Anything else?”

Albany shifted uneasily. “Our former employer… he’s a firecracker, isn’t he? He’s been telling me about his art, trying to throw a scare into me. He’s succeeded, I have to tell you. I see now why you’d rather be dead than his.” He sighed and looked at Ruiz with weary eyes. “Me too. I hope you can control him, Ruiz.”

“I think I can,” said Ruiz, summoning a confident tone. “If anyone can.”

“I guess so.” Albany sighed and shut his eyes. A moment later his breathing deepened and he began to snore.

Ruiz stretched, then went to the comm panel and slipped Diamond Bob’s wafer into the analyzer slot.

Remint called again, shortly after dawn, and woke Corean from an uneasy slumber, in which she had dreamed of ruin and flight. The dreams had been colored by dreadful images from the raving corridors of Dobravit — seepage from her locked-away childhood memories.

Marmo took the call, but Remint insisted he could speak only to Corean. By that time, Corean stood in the doorway, scratching at her sleep-tousled head. When she saw whose face filled the vidscreen, she moved to the comm panel.

“What is it?”

“Another sighting.”

“Where?” She was completely awake now, her bad dreams forgotten in the heat of her hatred.

“At the pens. He arrived in a small submersible, went inside for a few minutes, then emerged, reboarded the sub, and left.” Remint’s expressionless face told her nothing.

“You took him?” She was filled with elation.

“No. We expected him to arrive in a surface vessel — the gunboat — and arranged our subterfuges and devices accordingly. We had no way to strike at him within the pen’s lagoon; we had great difficulty in even getting a spymote inside. The pirate lords are incandescent with outrage; they’ve staffed the pens with numerous killmechs, they search for me everywhere. I fear my usefulness to my brother is permanently diminished.” At this digression, something kindled deep behind the slayer’s eyes.

“But you’re following him? Surely?”

“No. Outside the entrance, the sub dove, before we could get a transponder on it. It descended to a great depth, then went silent, and our detectors were unable to maintain contact.”

“You idiot!” Her elation had mutated into sizzling rage. “I ought to cut your throat and feed you to the margars.”

Remint seemed unaffected by her outburst. He leaned back and brought a sonic knife into the camera’s field of view. He activated the knife and touched the roil of displaced air delicately to his throat. “Do you so order?” As he spoke, the blade bit, just a little, and a flutter of blood ran along the edge of the knife’s envelope and spattered the camera’s lens with tiny red specks.

“No! No, don’t be foolish.” She watched him switch the knife off and put it away, apparently unconcerned with the red rivulet that trickled over the corded muscle of his throat. He was, she thought, a creature completely outside her experience, even though she had possessed a number of Genched slaves. None had displayed such frozen intensity; Remint must have been a remarkable man before his deconstruction.

He looked up, his eyes empty of emotion. “Shall I continue?”

“Yes.”

“Then: Ruiz Aw is considering what he learned in the pens. My belief is that he will seek me in my once-favorite place, a fabularium in a stack near my brother’s stronghold. Already the pirate lords have visited the Celadon Wind, as the place is called; their agents still infest every room and rathole. He will know this, but my assessment of the man is that he will believe that he can discover some vital information that the lords were too stupid to find. He is an egomaniac, as I once was. We were very much alike, in many ways.” His detachment seemed impossible, even for the robot of flesh and bone she knew him to be.

Corean considered. “You’re waiting for him there?”

“I hide myself and several slayers in an adjacent joypalace.”

She made a decision. “Send me a guide, and I’ll join you.”

His gaze was cool and full of evaluation. “Your passion may be a liability to my success.”

She snarled and said, “Just do it.” Then she cut the connection.

She sat back and thought about Ruiz Aw and his inexplicable luck. From somewhere a memory rose to torment her. She remembered that she had wondered aloud about Ruiz Aw, about whether his confidence arose from a foolish ignorance of the dangers of his situation, or whether it came from a strength so overpowering that he truly didn’t need to fear her.

A chill came over her, and she shivered involuntarily. No, no, that was ridiculous. Several times she had held his life in her hand, several times she could have snuffed him out effortlessly, and he couldn’t have resisted at all.

But still, a tiny voice whispered, deep inside her heart, but still, Ruiz Aw lives and thwarts you. And ignores you as he goes about his business.

SEVERAL THREAD BARS appeared on the analyzer’s screen, and Ruiz touched the first one, labeled SURVEILLANCE RECORDS. The thread expanded into its nested subjects, and he followed the one that contained the recording of the assault on the pens.

The screen cleared for an instant, and then filled with a slightly grainy image, harshly lit, of a large person in bulky black mirror-armor, who walked quickly through the entrance portal of the pens, accompanied by two smaller figures, also armored. The tagline at the screen’s lower right corner said: REMINT Y’YUBERE AND TWO UNKNOWNS.

Ruiz studied this new enemy. He began to feel a little sick. He had never met Remint, but he knew him, with a knowledge born of the countless bloody encounters that had forged Ruiz into what he was.

Ruiz was abruptly and completely sure that Remint was the kind of killer he most feared, the purest and most deadly species of slayer, a man who lived wholly in the moment, untroubled by regret or foreboding. The man moved as lightly as a recent heavyworld immigrant — he gave an impression of irresistible strength, tightly leashed. Behind the mirrored visor, his eyes would be flickering, seeing everything, weighing it on the scales of his purpose. He would destroy without thought whatever obstructed that purpose, instantly and with instinctive efficiency.

Ruiz touched the screen, and the lower left quadrant displayed a still image of Remint’s face, as he had appeared on his first visit to the pen. He could see a little of Alonzo Yubere in those features, but the resemblance was obscured by cloned muscle and reengineered bone, so that the expressionless eyes gleamed out of slits cut through a mask of inhumanly dense flesh. If anything, the slayer was more frightening without his armor — he seemed even more truly an engine of destruction.

This was, in fact, himself as he had been, and it was like looking into a smoky mirror and seeing a grinning skull. Ruiz shuddered. Could such a man be defeated? He had never really thought it possible, when he had been such a man himself.

The screen split and began to display another group of armored persons, four in number, tagged: CONFEDERATES OF REMINT Y’YUBERE, IDENTITIES UNKNOWN.

Ruiz touched the forward speed dot on the display, and held it down to cycle past the initial penetration. The two groups of armored raiders converged at a locked ingress to the common area. He saw Flomel, who had evidently been given a ceramic blast pencil during Remint’s previous visit, attach the pencil to a security mechanism at the ingress. He watched Flomel trigger a flare of energies that had melted the device, allowing Remint and his people to gain access to the common room.

There was the glare and percussion of weapons, torn bodies, running and screaming. The raiders moved efficiently through the hysteria, cutting down anyone who blocked their path.

They set rip charges at the inner doors of the other Pharaohans’ cells, detonated them, swept through. In what seemed an obvious afterthought, the last raiders to leave seized several of the nearest slaves and herded them along.

Ruiz paused the recording, frowned. He was still very tired, but something about the sequence of events bothered him. Why had the attempt to cover their true purpose been so transparently clumsy? In all the other aspects of the operation, Remint had been coldly brilliant, directing the raid with inhuman precision.

An idea bubbled up from some deep layer of paranoia, and Ruiz couldn’t help speculating: Was all this an elaborate charade, designed to draw Ruiz Aw into the open?

He shook his head. Even if it was the opening gambit in a clever trap, he would still have to respond. He filed the suspicion away for later examination and allowed the recording to play on.

The pen’s security forces had finally begun to react to the raid, and they brought up monomol barricades and heavy flutter guns, trying to prevent the raiders from escaping.

Remint seemed to go into another temporal frame of reference, moving so quickly that he became a blur the camera could not resolve into clarity, no matter how much Ruiz slowed the recording.

Remint flashed forward, ahead of his troops, rolling under the barricades before the guards could react and bring their flutter guns to bear.

Ruiz watched the slow-motion carnage, fascinated and horrified. There was a dreadful beauty in the slayer’s movements, as he spun from one guard to the next, slashing with a sonic knife and firing a pinbeam with his other hand. In an instant six guards were down.

One lived long enough to get off a poorly aimed burst. A stream of hypersonic particles scythed through two of Remint’s flankers, whose upper bodies dissolved into flying tatters of armor and bone. Only their legs remained whole, geysering blood, held upright by the frozen servos in their armor.

When the gun fired, Ruiz felt his heart stutter for a moment, as though crushed by the pressure of his anxiety for Nisa. But she and the others were in a tight cluster in the center of the raider’s formation, and the burst missed them by a considerable margin.

One of the raiders held a neural whip, which he flicked at the prisoner’s heels whenever they slowed. Now he touched Nisa with it, and she stumbled, and looked up at the hidden camera, eyes full of shock and pain.

Ruiz froze the image and zoomed it in, until her face filled the screen. His gaze lingered on the clean planes of her cheekbones, the luminous dark eyes, the rich sweet mouth. Even in this extremity of fright and bewilderment, her features projected an admirable strength. Ruiz thought he could almost see the shape of her thoughts. She was thinking about escape, or — if that was impossible — about survival. Then, in a rush of sad realization, Ruiz knew that she was also thinking: Where is Ruiz Aw?

He touched the screen and the playback resumed. He watched with a frozen adamant concentration, as the raiders swept through the halls and out onto the quay, where a battered, heavily armed gunboat waited.

The raiders, herding their prisoners, boarded the gunboat. It sped away, powerful engines thundering, throwing up a high roostertail. Hot light lanced from its weapons, destroying the other craft in the lagoon, presumably to prevent pursuit.

The camera’s viewpoint flickered and then resumed, following the raiders’ craft as it snaked through the twisting waterways.

After a few moments, a weapons pod on the boat’s armored transom twinkled orange fire, and the screen went white. A tagline at the bottom read: TRACKING DEVICE DESTROYED.

Ruiz frowned. He wished he were not so afraid of the slayer Remint; that fear would undermine his effectiveness.

Something cold and hard whispered in the back of his mind — words he shut out at first, not wanting to hear them. The whisper grew louder, until he could no longer ignore it. Leave her; she’s probably already dead, it said. He’ll destroy you; can there be any doubt of this?

“Probably not,” he muttered. But behind his eyes Nisa’s face floated, as he had seen it in the playback: beautiful, tender, true. He couldn’t abandon her, no matter how sensible that course might be. She had taken firm root in his heart; if circumstances tore her away from him, he didn’t think there would be enough left of his heart to keep beating.

He forced his attention back to the matter at hand, and went through the rest of Diamond Bob’s material.

When he was finished, he was no less afraid of Remint y’Yubere, but he knew where to start looking for him.

Albany sat in the copilot’s chair as Ruiz guided the sub into one of the subsurface openings that led to the lagoon at the heart of the stack.

“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” Albany was still pale and tense.

“No,” Ruiz said, as cheerfully as possible. “But at one time the man spent much of his time and money in the Celadon Wind; maybe I can cut his trail there.”

“What makes you think you’ll do any better than the lords? They’ve got good snoops, and snooping’s not your specialty.” Albany seemed dubious.

Ruiz shrugged. He had explained a bit about their quarry, leaving out the most frightening details. “We’re two of a kind,” he said. “I understand him better than the pirate snoops.”

“Seems thin,” said Albany dubiously.

It seemed thin to Ruiz too, but what else could he do?

The lagoon was a vast black emptiness beneath a high dome of slagged metal, a hollowed-out space a kilometer across.

Ruiz stood on the deck grating of the sub and looked up. Phosphorescent worms slithered across the dome, forming sinuous patterns of cold color; apparently an ancient work of bio-art gone feral.

Across the still water were scattered the riding lights of other vessels. Ruiz couldn’t see them well enough to tell if Publius’s gunboat was among them. He assumed that the gunboat Remint had used in the raid wasn’t here; surely the pirates would have found it, had Remint been so foolish as to come here.

They had picked up an automated mooring buoy. On securing their line, it had summoned one of the robotic bumboats that waited at the quay that circled the lagoon.

It arrived and Ruiz descended the narrow steps set into the sub’s bulging topsides. Albany leaned on the sub’s conning tower, looking down at Ruiz, his face obscured by the darkness. “I still think we ought to go to ground until this excitement blows over. I know places where we’d keep fat and happy.” He spoke in an oddly dispassionate tone. It suddenly seemed to Ruiz that perhaps some vital mechanism had broken down in Albany. He wondered what it might be, and how it had happened — and why it hadn’t happened to him, yet.

“You’re probably right,” Ruiz said. “But I don’t think I have any choice. If you want, I’ll put you ashore here, no hard feelings.”

Albany sighed. “No. I’ll stick. You still have your luck, Ruiz Aw. I need something; maybe that’s it. Besides, who’d keep an eye on our benevolent employer?”

Ruiz didn’t know what to say. The bumboat nudged the sub’s flank and beeped insistently. “Thanks,” he finally said, and stepped into the bumboat. He looked back at Albany as the bumboat backed water and drew away.

Albany waved and spoke in a low voice that carried across the water. “Good luck, Ruiz. Find what you need.”

The bumboat beeped again, inquisitively. “The Celadon Wind’s ingress,” Ruiz told it, and it carried him away.

Ruiz joined a procession of odd persons, walking up the ramp toward the Celadon Wind’s gate. To his right were a pair of old pirates, much scarred, wearing typically gaudy flamesilk shipsuits, arms affectionately linked, whispering endearments into each other’s dirty ears. To his left, uncomfortably close, was some sort of barbarian from a desert world, muffled in black robes, from which came the clink and rattle of many weapons. Ruiz edged away slightly, and slowed his pace so that the man passed him in a waft of ancient sweat and strong hashish. Farther up the ramp was a gang of devolved beasters, a half-dozen men and women with thick, crusty skin and swinish white-tusked faces. They skipped along like schoolchildren on an outing.

Just ahead walked a tall slender woman, naked except for steel-scaled slippers and a great mane of pale hair, confined by a headband set with pigeonblood rubies. In other circumstances, Ruiz might have been distracted by the pleasant rhythms of her movements.

But all he could think of was the terrible efficiency with which Remint disposed of his enemies. It was foolish to worry that he might meet the slayer in the fabularium; no one could be that stupid, or arrogant. But this was the beginning of a trail that might lead to Remint, and Ruiz was growing more and more afraid of the slayer. He felt his heartbeat pick up, he felt sweat break on his forehead, though the ramp was cooled by powerful ventilators, and he cursed himself for this weakness, which might lead not only to his own destruction, but to Nisa’s as well — if she still lived.

As he approached the top of the ramp, he managed to suppress the worst of his panic, though he could still feel it at the edges of his mind. He shook his head and tried to unobtrusively shrug some of the tension from his shoulders.

The gate was a tall structure of simulated stone, set against the metal wall of the fabularium. The deeply carved arch displayed elements of a hundred mythic traditions — most of the human persons who might pass beneath it would find some familiar imagery in the carvings. Old Earth gods sported with Jaworld dybbuks and Androsian chickcharneys. Avatars of the Serpent Mystery coiled about icons of the Chlorophyllic Eye. Nilotic succubi clung lasciviously to Dead God saints. The effect was of riotous chaos.

In the center of the arch was an inscription in some archaic Old Earth script Ruiz could not read.

To the side stood a tall Moc bondwarrior in a jewel-encrusted cape — the gatekeeper. A strategically placed spotlight struck an eye-hurting glitter from the cape, but Ruiz noticed that the cape was designed not to hamper the creature’s movements. With a carefully proclamatory gesture, it raised a vocalizer and then activated what was obviously a canned speech. “You may keep your weapons,” the vocalizer sang in a sweet androgynous voice. “But remember! Within, you are subject to the law of the Celadon Wind. Attempt to maim… and you will be maimed. Attempt to kill… and you will be killed. We possess the latest semi-sentient security devices, so do not think to circumvent our vigilance.”

“I won’t,” said Ruiz in a wistfully hopeful tone, and passed into the Celadon Wind.